


in which sadie is responsible for the destruction of property

by malevon



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, literally all i write anymore is angst and h/c, vague violence as always
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 01:09:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14008887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malevon/pseuds/malevon
Summary: oliver freezes.





	in which sadie is responsible for the destruction of property

Oliver freezes.

He never freezes, but he can feel his limbs turn into lead when he sees the spirit rear back its spectral hand, and then he is shoved and he is flying, rolling on the ground and coughing at the dust, and he thinks it’s from the attack, but _it would never have been that forgiving_ rings through his mind and he has no time to think.

The thing screams horribly, and Oliver doesn’t even have time to get to his feet before it prepares another attack directed towards him, raising its limb directly overhead and preparing to crush him, and he just barely makes it, scraping away from it at the last second. He needs to get to his feet, find his pole. Where did that go? 

His instincts are propelling him, not reason. Oliver scrambles to his feet now, nearly falling over again as his weight tries and fails to redistribute itself properly, and he circles around the beast, narrowly dodging attacks that it is only directing towards _him_. Almost jokingly, he wonders why Sadie isn’t catching any flack in this, and as he continues circling he feels his foot catch on something and he looks down and it’s her bat, and his stomach doesn’t even have time to drop before instinct makes him quickly grab it and rejoice in the fact that he is now weaponized.

He freezes again, this time purposely, and he waits for another blow to come. It does, and it comes towards him just like a perfect pitch, or at least what he thinks is one, he’s never played baseball, and maybe that’s a good thing because his stance as he swings the bat directly through its hand is abysmal.

The spirit _screams_ , and Oliver can see it fade out slightly, rippling through its body like static. Its palm where the bat made contact is nothing but a hole now, and Oliver has no time to dwell on his stinging hands, only time to rush towards its middle and swing at its head. The noise it makes upon contact is guttural, and, stupidly, Oliver’s first thought is how the two of them have never been caught, when their prey always make noises this loud.

It writhes for a bit under the bat, and Oliver does not dare move as it dies beneath him, fearful that if he does, it will. He doesn’t know. Regenerate, or something? He doesn’t move until the entire old shed goes quiet, then removing the bat from the spirit’s receding spectral form like some kind of fucked up sword in the stone. It makes a really ugly noise.

He stands there, just breathing, for a moment, and he thinks it’s just too damn quiet.

“Sadie?” he hesitates with this, afraid of its implications. He gives her a beat and a half of silence before he asks again, and still, there is nothing. With every second that passes, his mind wanders to deeper and deeper places, and he drops the bat, looking around the shed intently. It’s a goddamn shed, there’s not many places for her to be, and that gaping hole in the side of the wall definitely was not there when they first walked in.

Cautiously, Oliver steps up to the gap, observing the collapsed roof and wall in awe. His legs suddenly feel weak as the adrenaline leaves his system, and he kneels by the pile of wreckage, and as soon as he leans in closer, his vision refocuses, and he sees her.

“Aw, fuck, Sadie, what the fuck,” he spits, vigor returning to his arms just so he can throw away the old rotting boards that cover her. She’s laying on her back, eyes closed, and Oliver fears the absolute worst. He moves some more boards, a steady string of curses flying from his mouth, so uncharacteristic of him, and he thinks about whether or not to touch her, afraid of the extent—

“What—“ she gasps, and Oliver feels himself relax, if only a little. “—are you doing?”

“Oh, god, Sadie,” Oliver breathes, and all fear of touching her goes away as he gets a hand under her neck, and another under her knees. She winces, biting back a cry, and a long stream of apologies comes from his mouth and he wills himself to stand. His legs aren’t going to get them too far, only as far as his car, but that’s all they need. “Keep talking to me, come on.”

“Tired.”

“I know. Tell me what you did, tell me what happened.”

“You—froze.”

Realization hits Oliver as hard as the spirit hit Sadie, and he nearly drops her in anger, in surprise, in shock. He sighs, focusing on walking. He can’t articulate anything right now. He feels like he’s going to cry. 

He goes quiet. He’s now living from left foot to right foot. They’ve left the shed behind, but he had parked his car so far away, hidden in the woods. His body is going numb, and his mind has already done so. 

“Oli,” she says, and he risks a glance down at her. Her eyes are still closed, and he feels like maybe he should be pushing her to keep them open, to stay awake, but he can’t bring himself to ask for anything from her right now. But he has to, he has to, if this is going to be worth anything.

“Stay awake with me, Sadie, come on,” he pleads, looking back ahead of him. The car is just barely in sight, they would make it. 

“So tired.”

“I know, I know.” Impulsively, he cranes his head down and presses a light kiss to her forehead, gritting his teeth and willing himself to just keep walking, don’t break down now, you’re so close, Oliver.

Oliver tries to open the back door to his car, but Sadie grunts in disapproval. “Shotgun,” she manages, and it takes Oliver all he has not to start crying, not to start laughing. He complies, situating her in the front seat, and in the dim light of his car he can see. He can see her entire right side covered in bruises, already deep purple, her right arm bent awkwardly, a few cuts from where the wall collapsed on top of her. He wants to throw up. He doesn’t. 

He simply gets in the car, tries to remember how to drive. He knows how to do this. He does it every day, to school, to Sadie’s house, but in the moment, he can’t remember anything at all. His movements are hesitated, calculated, but when he presses the gas, he presses down hard.

“Oli,” Sadie says again, and he doesn’t look over. 

“Yeah?”

“Home.”

“Nope, hospital.”

“ _Nooo_ ,” she whines, and Oliver bites his lip. At least there’s still some Sadie in there, he thinks. 

“Hospital, then you can go home.”

“Okay.”

They sit in silence for a long while, with Oliver occasionally checking if she’s still awake. His worry has died down, but not considerably, and he’s breaking every speed limit it’s possible to break. He’s so focused on driving that when a hand touches his arm, he almost screams, swerving a little, but reason tells him it’s only Sadie, only Sadie, and he takes one of his sweaty, sweaty palms off of the steering wheel and puts it in hers. 

_Then_ he starts crying.

.

.

.

A month later, they go back to that old shed. Sadie refuses to leave her bat there, and Oliver supposes that he does have a particular attachment to his pole.

Sadie’s arm is in a sling, and though her leg didn’t break, Oliver can still see that she has the tiniest bit of a limp that she says will go away in time. As he looks at the shed, here in broad daylight, he can barely bring himself to even look at her.

He frowns as she marvels at the gaping hole in the wall, the wood rotten and starting to vanish beneath the earth. There’s ant piles formed over the planks. Sadie lets out a low whistle.

“Damn, that thing hit me _hard_ ,” she says, tracing the outline of the hole with her eyes. She laughs, almost, and Oliver can’t tell if it’s sincere or not.

She climbs over the wreckage and he follows, keeping a close eye on her back, on her arm. Words get caught in his throat, and he struggles to cough them up.

“Why?”

That was stupid, Oliver thinks. Jumbles of words in his mind at the moment and all he can get out is one syllable.

Sadie turns after bending over to pick up her bat, hefting it in her hands again and smiling at it as if it were an old friend, and she blinks at him. “What’s that?”

He swallows. “Why did you push me?”

She blinks again, quirking one side of her mouth. “Why not?” is her answer, and she says it so matter-of-factly that it makes Oliver feel very very dumb for speaking up in the first place.

“I’m not about to argue about which of us is worth more, Oli. So don’t start.”

That shuts him up.

“Let’s find your pole, come on.” Sadie starts looking around in the shed, and Oliver stands there, frozen in thought, stuck there being useless. Sadie drops something as she digs around, and the sound of it makes him snap out of his reverie; he climbs the rest of the way over the pile of wood, and starts looking around. It can’t be that hard to lose a six foot metal pole, really.

“You know,” Sadie says from across the room, and Oliver stops. “you would have done the same for me, yeah?”

He is quiet. He’s been awfully quiet. He knows what answer she _wants_ to hear, but he’s not sure if he can give it to her.

“That’s too long of a pause,” Sadie says, and he knows she’s joking, but something in her tone stings him. “You failed my test. We have to stop being friends now.”

“I don’t know if I would, Sadie.”

They look at each other and Oliver withers. He hates this.

“I would want to. _God_ , I would want to because I want to keep you safe and I hate that you pushed me, but I froze. And if you had been me, I—I don’t know if I would freeze, then, too.”

Oliver goes back to looking for his pole, because Sadie’s grown quiet and he needs something to do with his hands before he starts biting his nails again. In the past month he’s worn them down to nothing. It’s bad.

He finds his pole. It had been knocked into a corner and covered up by some of the wreckage. Sadie doesn’t say anything as they go back to his car, and the silence is killing him and he hates that he said anything in the first place. 

By the time he starts the car, Oliver is numb. Driving gives him something else to focus on other than his own stupidity, and he’s so deep in thought, deep in his fixation on the dirt path ahead of him, that he almost screams when something touches his arm, but reason tells him that’s it’s only Sadie, only Sadie.

“I get it. Before it happened, I thought the same thing. But when it did, I didn’t _have_ to think about it.”

Oliver feels some of his tension fall away. He focuses on the road.

“I want to keep you safe too, you know.”

Oliver gets hit with a strange sense that this has happened before as his eyes start to water slightly, but blinks the tears away before they can pose any real threat. He takes one of his hands from the wheel and puts it in Sadie’s, and for that moment, everything is fixed.

.

.

.

“Thanks for carrying me, by the way,” she says later in the car ride, when the poignance of earlier has melted away. Oliver cringes. 

“How much of that do you remember?”

“I remember you swearing like a sailor and crying like a baby.”

“Not my proudest moment, to be sure.”

“Not mine, either.”

**Author's Note:**

> i hope the decline in quality about halfway through isn’t too noticeable cause i wrote the first half in like an hour a month ago and i just wrote the second half in like 30 minutes


End file.
